


in hard armoured words we are drowned

by kimaracretak



Category: The West Wing
Genre: (hoynes it's the hoynes thing i hate him so much), Closeted Character, Developing Relationship, F/F, Female Friendship, Lesbian Character, Los Angeles, Mentorship Feelings, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, implied/referenced past sexual assault, lesbian history, partially pre-canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-05-10 15:44:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5591965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(change waltzes in with her sister pain / waiting for you to send her away / wish her well, break the chain): She meets up with the campaign in Virginia. They're never going to win and they know it, and it gives them a reckless optimistic confidence that Carol can feel the moment she walks in the door. It feels like her first time stepping into the <em>Post</em>'s newsroom. Better.</p><p>Or; on lesbian history and being closeted in washington : a full-series rewrite through Carol's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> chapter one of [??] for the west wing big bang, or, guess whose inability to write fic in order has bitten her in the arse
> 
> i would like to have been an author who did not post this while drunk two and a half hours past midnight in her own timezone but, you know, this is me
> 
> title from phideaux, "waiting for the axe to fall", summary quote from tori amos, "ophelia"

There is a very long list of things Carol Fitzpatrick does not believe in. Coincidences, fate, boys who tell the truth, and gods are fairly high on the list; politicians occupy the very highest spot. This list of disbeliefs gets her through a childhood in Washington D.C. with zero boyfriends, two suspensions from her Catholic high school, and an internship at the Washington Post.

Her life is on track, until the day she sees CJ Cregg on television.

_Oh_ , she thinks.

And then, _shit_.

And then, _I am in so much trouble_.

She is not, precisely, wrong.

 

****

 

Her mother thinks Carol's crazy when she starts talking about joining the Bartlet campaign. Throwing her life and career away, to be exact, and maybe that's worse. Carol just rolls her eyes. The _Post_ isn't for her, she tries and fails to explain, more than once, the peculiar combination of grit and artifice all spun round with an arrogant carelessness that marks their journalism has never sat right with her. Campaigns might have a loose, subjective view of truth, but at least they _have_ a truth. The paper just has headlines.

"Well, at least join a campaign that can get _elected_ ," her mother finally sighs in resignation. "What's wrong with Hoynes?"

Carol bites her lip and doesn't say anything about the whispers that circulate among the young female set in the district, the ones that keep track of who's safe to work with and who isn't, who's all talk and who'll actually grab your ass at parties or worse.

"He's from _Texas_ ," she comes up with, after trying out and discarding several policy-based arguments. The truth of it tastes thin in her mouth.

Her mother rolls her eyes and mutters something about how Carol better not come crying to her when the campaign fails. Carol thinks about CJ's eyes, about Governor Bartlet's static-filled voice echoing from her television. About Jess coming back from Austin with a too-bright smile and the locks on her editor's office door. There are worse things than failing campaigns.

 

****

 

She meets up with the campaign in Virginia. They're never going to win and they know it, and it gives them a reckless optimistic confidence that Carol can feel the moment she walks in the door. It feels like her first time stepping into the _Post_ 's newsroom. Better.

She thinks, at first, that she's going to do this properly, find someone who looks like they're in charge and ask them who she can speak to about joining the campaign. And then she sees CJ Cregg leaning against a wall, seemingly engrossed in a sheaf of papers, all curls and glasses and long legs that even a hideous skirt suit can't make unappealing, and all of her carefully prepared speeches vanish in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately her brain seems to be the only thing that's decided to stop working, because she finds herself threading her way through the chaos of the office floor and asking "Ma'am? CJ?" before she's quite decided to do so.

CJ looks up, frowns at the unfamiliar face. Drops her eyes to Carol's chest, where a staff badge conspicuously  _isn't,_ and Carol doesn't blush under her gaze, she _doesn't._ "Yeah?" CJ says, somehow managing to sound like she's asking four questions at once.

"Um," Carol says, as her brain chooses to start working again by chanting _idiot you're being an idiot_. "Carol Fitzpatrick. _Washington Post_. Formerly, sort of."

"I don't do one on ones unless you've scheduled them with someone." Bored, like she's said it a thousand times before. She probably has. She returns to the papers in her hand, but before Carol can do more than open her mouth to try to salvage something of the increasingly ridiculous situation, something catches up to CJ and her tone sharpens. "Wait. _Formerly, sort of_?"

"Yeah." Carol tries to feel like something other than a misbehaving student. "I put in my notice. I want to work for you. The campaign," she clarifies quickly, "but also you. Your office."

CJ raises an eyebrow. Carol readies herself to flee the building -- the state -- in embarrassment, but all CJ says is, "I have an office?"

"I ... I mean ..."

But CJ grins at her. "Relax, I'm kidding. Mostly. But tell me why a campaign that can barely pay its current staff should hire you."

Carol's mind goes blank again, rehearsed speeches gone along with everything on her resume. _Think_ , she orders her brain, which has unhelpfully reverted to cycling its way through the proofs for tomorrow's domestic politics section. CJ's still waiting. Except -- _oh._ "There's a quote," she says, hoping her voice really is as steady as it sounds to her ears. "In tomorrow's _Post_. Danny, quoting you, on education policy." She's gambling, really, that CJ will know who she means, but she's not sure she wants to work for her if she doesn't. "And you uh. Might. Want to check it. Or something. Because it's not. Quite. What you said, when I watched."

She shuts her mouth, aware that she's probably babbling, and wonders if she's just completely tanked any chance she had at being taken seriously. But CJ's regarding her more openly now, and looks the furthest thing from bored. "When did you say your last day at the _Post_ was?"

_I didn't,_ Carol thinks, but that, at least, she's not stupid enough to say. "Wednesday. Ma'am."

CJ smiles, small and secret. "I'll call you Tuesday."

And that, suddenly, was that.

 

****

 

So she goes back to the office, and tries valiantly to keep the smirk off her face as she listens to Danny argue with someone -- CJ, presumably -- about school vouchers and journalistic ethics and _that's what you said back then, it's just context_. By the time he's hung up and tossed a notebook across the DC crime reporter's desk, he's attracted a very amused audience. Carol flees to the coffeemaker to avoid bursting out into entirely inappropriate laughter.

CJ calls exactly half an hour after she gets home Tuesday night. Carol holds her breath and forces herself to let the phone ring once, twice, three times before picking it up and saying "Carol Fitzpatrick" in as professional a voice as she's capable of.

"Carol, hi, it's CJ Cregg from the Bartlet campaign."

_I know_ , Carol doesn't say. "Thanks for calling," she says, instead, which isn't much better considering that they'd both known this was going to happen.

"Um, yeah," CJ says, and Carol bites back a groan. She really has to get better at things like _talking to CJ without sounding like a ten year old_ if she wants to be her assistant. "Anyway, can you start on Monday? We'll be in the District for a couple days then, enough time to get you organised."

Carol makes very sure she doesn't sound _overly_ excited when she says, "Yes, absolutely!"

"Great!" CJ says, and maybe it's just the connection but Carol likes to think CJ sounds at least as professionally excited as she did. "Someone else will be in touch about the details, but I'll see you Monday?"

"That sounds perfect," Carol says.

"All right. Talk to you soon."

"Yeah. Bye," Carol manages, instead of the delighted, disbelieving laugh she wants to let free instead.

She waits until she's sure CJ's hung up before laughing loudly enough to scare her roommate's cat. She's going to join a _campaign._ She's going to work for CJ Cregg. And they're never going to win and it's going to be an adventure and she can't _wait._

 

****

 

Except they do win. Slowly at first, barely noticeable, and then suddenly in the time it takes Carol to blink she's working for the Democratic presidential nominee. It's perfect, almost. Would be perfect for _real_ , except for the part where Bartlet's followed the grand tradition of American presidential nominees for the past age and extended the offer of the vice presidency to Hoynes.

"He creeps me out," Bonnie mutters to her one morning over a lukewarm motel breakfast in Colorado.

_Who_? Carol almost asks, but then she follows Bonnie's gaze across the room and sees Hoynes standing too close to one of his staffers, a blonde Texan whose name Carol feels guilty for not remembering. _Of course._ "He's a..." She pauses, tries to think of something that won't get her in too much trouble if overhead. "He's. Unfortunate." She still can't get Jess's face out of her head every time she sees Hoynes.

"Why did Governor Bartlet pick him, anyway?" Ginger sighs. "If he just needed the Texas votes, I'm sure there's someone else without all those ... stories."

"Men don't care about the stories," Carol says, cutting a questionable looking sausage with a bit more force than necessary. Her knife skitters across the plate, and Ginger and Bonnie flinch at the noise. "Not unless they're going to become news. Usually not even then."

"I wonder," Bonnie says slowly, and then ducks her head as Hoynes turns toward their table, flashing a grin that Carol's sure he thinks is charming but that she's also sure makes most women on the receiving end of it want to punch him in the mouth. "I wonder how many of them are true."

Ginger scowls. "Doesn't matter, does it?" _Of course it does,_ Carol thinks, but Ginger goes on. "Even if none of them are true, and I don't believe that, you know he's the type. We just ... have to watch out for each other, you know?"

_We just hold on,_ Carol thinks. Dimly, she's aware of Bonnie saying something in reply, but she can't hear, can't breathe right. _We hold on and hold on and don't say anything until until until what? It's never enough._ Suddenly she needs to be anywhere but at this breakfast table. "Sorry," she says abruptly, pushing her plate away and standing up quickly. Too quickly. "Sorry, I forgot, I needed to give Margaret a thing."

"Are you okay?" Bonnie asks, brow creased with concern. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

Carol bites her lip. She hadn't quite realised how much time on the campaign trail would be taken up by just keeping her mouth shut. All her time trying to be professional and something other than awestruck in front of CJ, and it's the women she ought to be befriending for _real_ that keep managing to trip her up, throw her into ... this. She'd take so much instead of this. "Yeah," she says finally, when she realises both Bonnie and Ginger are waiting for an answer. "Yeah, no, I'm fine. Just didn't sleep well, you know?"

She flees before they can ask any more questions.

 

****

 

The move into the White House goes well. Too well, Carol thinks at the time, and when the next year takes every opportunity to prove her right she starts regretting jinxing it. Three days into the move, she and CJ are still sitting on the floor in CJ's office sorting through boxes of paperwork at ten at night. Sam and Josh and Toby and what has to have been nearly all of the ever-shifting pool of bright-eyed assistants have all drifted past to say good night hours ago, but even though Carol is pleasantly exhausted -- and she's pretty sure CJ is as well -- neither of them have made any move to leave.

Carol twirls her hair absently as she reads, wondering how long she needs to spend trying to decipher a former staffer's handwriting before she's allowed to give up on it. Fortunately -- _un_ fortunately -- CJ saves her from having to make that decision by saying, "Hey, Carol, by the way..."

She nearly rips a chunk of hair out jerking up in response, and then she almost wishes she _had_ because that would be a distraction from CJ, mid-stretch with her arms above her head and back curved and one errant red curl falling into her eyes. _Shit,_ she thinks resignedly, and then, automatically, _stop staring, Carol,_ even though it's been long enough that she likes to think she's trained herself out of doing that. "Yeah?" she says, and her voice doesn't betray a thing.

"You're from here, aren't you?"

Safe question. "Lived in the district my whole life, ma'am." She hadn't expected CJ to remember that, and the knowledge that she had sends a thrill through Carol.

CJ's eyeing her speculatively. "So where does a girl go for drinks on a Friday night?"

_Fuck._ Less of a safe question. Carol hadn't realized until she started working for the Bartlet campaign just how many seemingly innocent questions she couldn't answer without stapling a giant neon _lesbian_ sign on her forehead. CJ would probably mind the least of any of her new coworkers -- CJ from Berkeley and Hollywood who looks at Abbey Bartlet like Carol's trying not to look at CJ herself -- but that doesn't mean it's a conversation Carol wants to have right now. Or anytime soon. Or ever.

"Um," she says when she realises CJ's still waiting for an answer. She runs through a list of names in her head, trying to come up with a bar the White House Press Secretary can go to without starting rumors. Shit. When was the last time she had gone to a non-gay bar that wasn't overrun with college students? "I don't ... think you'd like the places where my friends and I hang out," she finally comes up with. Not a lie. Not an answer, either, though, and they both know it.

CJ laughs, low and soft and Carol digs her short fingernails into her palm trying not to visibly react. God, she needs to get out of here, or at least away from all this talk of bars, before she says something she regrets. Or loses an obscene amount of time fantasizing about CJ in a gay bar.

"Come on, I'm not that old," CJ grins. "I don't want to sit in some overstuffed leather chair in the corner of a fancy politician's bar, sadly sipping scotch with jazz on the radio. Where do you go?"

Fuck _goddamnit_. Carol squeezes her eyes shut, takes a deep, steadying breath. What the hell. She would prefer they have this conversation a week, a month later, any time when she might have a better idea of how CJ would react. But they're stuck, now, and might as well take the conversation through every possible variant of dumb and awkward they could and get it out of the way. She opens her eyes to find CJ staring at her with concern. "Are you okay?"

Carol bites her lip, blows out a tired breath. "Yeah. No, well, yeah, I'm fine, it's just . . . the places I go . . . it wouldn't be a good idea for you, for press secretary you, to go to. It's maybe not a good idea for me to go, anymore." _Great, now you sound like you're in a cult._ "I mean. Considering. Our Congress. And, you know, jobs."

_Please get it, please get it_. She's never been ashamed of her sexuality, but she _has_ gotten used to not mentioning it. "By the way, I'm a lesbian" is one of those things you just don't say to the boss you're sort of idolising, sort of befriending, especially when you work at the White House.

"Oh," CJ says, narrowing her eyes. She's quiet for so long that Carol starts to debate the merits of just running out of the room, politeness and work both be damned. And then CJ says _oh_ again, eyes widening and an understanding impossibly cruel in its kindness dawning in her eyes. "Yeah, okay," she says, and Carol is dying, dreaming, dead, "I should probably . . . stop going to those sorts of places as well."

Somewhere in the back of her mind Carol dimly recognizes that she should probably be given some sort of award for not passing out on the spot. This wasn't supposed to happen, CJ wasn't supposed to be any sort of definition of available, ever. "Then you're..." She can't say it, even now.

"Mhm," CJ replies, and it's an answer rather than an admission, but Carol's heart flips anyway. "I think I'd like some names anyway. Just to know."

 

****

 

Things go wrong almost immediately with the Cornell Rooker nomination, and not even teasing CJ about having six hundred thousand religious conservatives praying for her makes anything about that disaster bearable.

"That," CJ says, dropping her papers onto her desk after they wrap the press conference withdrawing Rooker's name, "was it. Our one, massive, rookie clusterfuck. The one and only implosion that the papers are gonna laugh about rather than tear us apart for."

"Uh," Carol says, casting a pointed glance at the newspapers folded sadly in the corner. "The _Wall Street Journal_ might disagree with that, a bit." Not that it wouldn't be nice to withstand a bit of new-kid mockery rather than pointed accusations of incompetence, but ...

CJ makes a disgusted noise. "The _Journal_. People read that for things other than the financials?"

"Yep," Carol sighs, retrieving the papers and stacking them in some semblance of order. "You don't, because you only read my summaries, but unfortunately, other people do."

"They're good summaries," CJ says. She's the picture of offended innocence, and suddenly Carol's sure she's blushing a darker red than CJ's shirt.

"Thank you, ma'am," she murmurs, not meeting CJ's eyes.

She wants to leave, to try to construct some semblance of order from Sam and Toby's scrawled notes on new AG nominees, but she hesitates. CJ's quiet, behind her desk, and the silence feels expectant. So she waits, shuffling her papers and hoping she's not just imagining things.

She's not. CJ's almost inaudible when she breaks the silence with "Hey, look," but she does, and Carol fights to keep the smile off her face when she turns around. Not appropriate, even though her brain is more than happy to reinterpret that as _hey, look at me,_ and she's more than willing to do so.

"Yeah?" Her own voice isn't much louder.

CJ is quiet for a very, very long moment before saying, "Carol, you've been ... really great, through all of this. Thanks."

Carol's mind goes absolutely blank. "I ... of course," she says finally. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, ma'am."

"I'm glad," CJ says. "I'm glad you're here." Her smile, Carol thinks, could power the entire White House.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi hello i'm (mostly) not dead; this fic is not dead
> 
> chapter warning for non-graphic talk of anti-gay hate crimes

The morning Josh Lyman grabs her almost before she's cleared security, snags her hand that's just taken her pass back from the guard while he's halfway through skidding down the hall, is the morning that starts the third worst day of her life so far.

"Carol, right? CJ's..." he waves a hand vaguely through the air, "...person?"

And, oh, there's so much inherent in being CJ's _person_ that she wants to dwell in the word for _hours_ ,and also maybe give Josh a lecture about how he's known her for eight months, but Josh looks worried. So all she says is, "Yeah, what's up?"

"There's a — We have a problem," he says, and there's something in his inflection that makes Carol's stomach knot.

"Don't we alway —" The joke dies on her lips as Josh's eyes darken.

"Not like this. Come on."

And then he's off down the hall, and she has no choice but to follow, stumbling over her own feet and around corners, trying to balance her and CJ's coffees and being very glad that she hadn't yet changed from the sneakers she drove in with into her heels. Josh talks the entire time — well, not so much talks as yells instructions at everyone they pass, anything from " _Ginger!_ Find me Sam, yesterday!" and "Donna, printer, thing, please!", not sticking around long enough for replies.

"What?" Carol demands when they're finally in his office, throwing the hand not preoccupied with coffee in the air in exasperation.

Josh narrows his eyes at her. "What do you know about Casey Creek?"

_It's a small river-like thing that girls named Casey play in?_ she would have suggested if it was any other sort of morning, but maybe she doesn't know exactly what's going on but she's figured out enough to know it's not a morning for jokes. "Nothing. What do I need to know?"

"Everything." Donna hands him a printout that he slaps in front of her without looking at, because this is what it means to have an assistant here. Carol looks, though, reads _hostage_ before the rest of the letters slip off the page, irrelevant.

"Oh," she says, kicking herself for not slipping into crisis mode as soon as Josh had grabbed her. _Priorities_ , sometimes she thinks no one else in the office has them.

"Yeah, oh — Bonnie! Where's Leo?" He doesn't wait for an answer before tearing off back out the door, and Carol decides it's safest to assume that this email printout is the closest thing to a briefing that she's going to get. But CJ is going to need something more.

By the time CJ comes in Carol's yelled at three people on the phone and hung up on four more in disgust. It's enough to brief her, enough to feel like something slightly more than a failure when she sends her boss out into the room.

She spends the entire day on the dais with CJ, hands her papers, fields her calls, fetches food and coffee during the long spells when there's no news but sitting still seems like a betrayal. Watches Ginger and Bonnie and Donna, clasps their hands tight for fleeting seconds whenever she passes by them, and it's enough to anchor her.

It's enough that she almost feels like something other than a liar as she helps CJ say: _we're here for you, we're working on this, it's going to be over soon._ It's not enough for them to end the day without a body count.

Nothing about the crisis resolution is pretty, little more is salvageable, but Carol is just about ready to start thinking there's a way to move forward — turn off her computer, make sure CJ leaves, collapse on her couch with leftover Thai food and her roommate's cat and stare blankly at the news until she slips into a couple hours of sleep — when Danny Concannon shows up, notebook open and pencil firmly behind his ear, looking every inch the journalist and not at all like his day's been as long as hers.

"I know she's still in," he says, glancing pointedly at CJ's darkened window.

Carol sighs. "Would it kill you to pretend for five minutes that 'asshole' isn't part of your job description?" She and Danny had never worked particularly well together, but they had shared space on the domestic politics desk for four months without either of them resorting to murder. At the _Post_ , that practically qualified them for a Nobel Peace Prize; now, it just means she wants him as far away from both her and CJ as possible.

"I don't know. Would it kill _you_  to actually let me do my job?" As if his were automatically the more important, as if she didn't work for the White House Press Secretary.

"You know what, Concannon —" she starts, but CJ interrupts from the doorway before she gets the satisfaction of taking even a fraction of her bad day out on him.

"Carol, it's okay." She sounds exhausted, looks, in the mix of lamplight and fluorescents, even worse. "It's okay," she repeats, when Carol looks at her in disbelief. "It's going to be worse tomorrow if I don't give someone a one-on-one tonight."

Danny is insufferably smug when he says, "See? I know what I'm doing."

She almost, almost wants to punch him. Instead, she gives him her fakest smile, softens it to a real one when she catches CJ's eye. "I'll be here." _If you need me_ , she doesn't say, but CJ just gives her a tired smile as she follows Danny into her office. She thinks CJ understands anyway: she doesn't send her home, and that's nothing close to a win but it's a small soft comfort in a dismal day. It's more than she could have hoped for, anyway.

 

****

 

Casey Creek could have brought down a different administration, Carol thinks. Rooker had been their first mistake, but this had been their first _disaster_ , and they managed to come away shaken but with a new appreciation for how to hold on tight to each other. Almost a family, she laughs to Bonnie over beers one night, and when Bonnie grins and punches her in the shoulder and says _that's my little sister_ Carol clinks their bottles together and pretends that she's not carrying a secret like a bomb in her heart.

She goes back and forth, with herself, arguing about whether it would matter to her, to the administration, if she came out, or if she at least stopped pretending so hard.

_You're just a secretary,_  the part of her who always thought she would grow up brave points out.  _Congress wouldn't care. The public certainly wouldn't._

_A secretary who people are starting to think is more of a deputy to CJ Cregg than her actual deputies_ , the part of her who handed four to eight years of her life to the US Government and a certain press secretary without a second thought corrects. _Congress loves their witch hunts, and you're keeping CJ's secret too._

But Carol has more than enough to think about, so much so that it's an argument she can ignore with a little effort most of the time. She begs off from going out with her friends when she thinks there's a chance she might be recognised, CJ plays a very careful pronoun game with her and is the sort of mentor she only dreamed of finding in the newsroom in every other way.

Until CJ bows to Mandy's awful PR game and keeps the Lydells away from the hate crimes legislation signing, and everything Carol thought she was learning about her work friends — _almost a family,_ including the part where families are the best at hurting each other — destabilises.

She locks CJ's office door behind them as soon as enough of their wing of the building has emptied out, folds her arms and gives CJ the glare she had always used to get better story assignments out of her editors. "How the hell could you let her do that?"

To her credit, CJ doesn't even pretend to not know what Carol's talking about. "Because in this case, Mandy was right. The Lydells didn't support the president. We couldn't have them at the signing."

"Didn't support —" Carol drags a hand through her hair. "Did it occur to you that they have a point? That maybe from where some of us are standing, it looks like the administration doesn't exactly support some of us who — who fucking work for it? Because it's great that my murderers will be punished worse now but _somehow_  I'm still not left feeling like I'm seen as an actual person _before_  someone turns me into a corpse." She's out of so many lines, she realises dimly, but at the moment she can't bring herself to care. She's been pretending for more than a year, been serving a supposedly progressive president for nearly two, and she misses the woman she was before the campaign.

"Carol," CJ says, and her voice trembles a little, but she's calm, she's so _fucking calm_  and Carol hates her for it. "Carol, you know we have to survive as an administration in order to do anything else."

Carol snorts in disbelief. "Due respect, ma'am, I'm _angry_ , I'm not a _child._  I just don't think it's too much to ask that God's gift to progressive politics does something other than what Congress tells him to. It's his image but it's our _lives._ " Us, our, except she's not sure anymore that CJ _cares._ Well, except for the part where CJ hasn't fired her yet, which is either a solidarity-fuelled indulgence or just a ridiculously long lead-in to the firing that's in her immediate future.

CJ's quiet for a long, long moment, and the desk between them feels like a continent. Finally, CJ sighs. "For what it's worth," she starts, and Carol steels herself against whatever's coming next. "I think it was a shitty call too. I just don't think that means it can't also have been the right one. It's the start of something, not the end."

Even through her anger, Carol can feel her old belief, her old hope clinging to CJ's words. And she wants to believe her, wants it more than anything in this moment, but all she manages to say is, "Yeah, okay, I'm gonna . . . go home and sleep on it, I guess. But . . ."

"Yeah?" CJ says. She's taken off her glasses at some point, Carol realises, looks softer now.

Carol bites her lip. "It's not enough," she says. "You have to know we're lying if we say it is."

"But it's _good_ ," CJ says, and there's a note of finality to it that fills the room. "I'll see you tomorrow, Carol." _In the morning, where we're going to pretend this didn't happen, for the good of both of our jobs._

Carol's not _completely_ lost her ability to read people, even in the midst of this uncertainty. She doesn't even slam any doors on her way out.

Not even when she gets home to an empty apartment, when she remembers her roommate's on a research trip for the week and decides that maybe by "sleep on it" she meant "drink a third of a bottle of cheap vodka and call my sorta but not really an ex about it". She's still angry at CJ, even if she pulled back from completely torching their professional and personal relationships, and pretending, as she tells Emilia very seriously after they've made a solid dent in the remainder of the vodka and have moved on to forgetting why they're in the middle of one of their periods of being an ex-something instead of a _something_ , can go fuck itself.

"Uh-huh," Emilia agrees, about all she can manage words-wise when it's so much more interesting to use her mouth to rediscover all the ticklish spots on the underside of Carol's breasts. "'Cept this sort of fucking's more interesting."

She leans up for a kiss, which Carol welcomes, but when she slips her hand into Carol's underwear to prove her point, Carol breaks away.

"Nope," she says, rolling them over as best she can in her relatively narrow bed, "My turn first." She slides her way down Emilia's body, leaving scattered kisses in her wake, and takes the opportunity to divest Emilia of her panties completely. "Missed you," she murmurs, resting her cheek against the smooth brown skin of Emilia's inner thigh as she keens above her, one hand reaching down to tangle in her hair.

Carol loses patience with teasing and she moans herself as her fingers find Emilia wet and wanting, and, god, she's missed this, missed Emilia, missed her other friends, missed not pretending.

She shifts between Emilia's legs, speeds up the motion of her fingers and presses her own thighs together in search of friction. Maybe they'll figure out a way to be _something_  again. Maybe she'll put CJ out of her mind outside of the office, put her stupid crush away with the rapidly vanishing remnants of her hero worship.

Carol twists her fingers, circles Emilia's clit with her thumb, and as she watches her friend tremble and cry out in orgasm, she almost believes herself.


	3. Chapter 3

Los Angeles is the first big trip Carol gets to go on since the campaign, and she tries not to show how excited she really is about it. Sure, it's great CJ trusts her to manage everything in her absence, but everything in LA seems so much bigger, so much _more_. It helps, too that they're and administration now, rather than a campaign, but it's more still: something is building around them all, collecting at the edges and snapping tenuous twigs of the status quo.

She's in California and Ted Marcus is getting ten minutes alone with the president and something is going to _happen_.

"Carol," CJ says just then, quietly and deliberately in the tone of voice Carol has come to learn means that rules are about to be broken, "what are we doing for dinner tonight?"

 _Dinner?_ Carol had half been counting on her dinner being nothing but a granola bar on the press bus back to Edwards. "Dinner, ma'am?"

CJ's grin betrays far too much amusement at managing to wrong-foot Carol for once, succeeding where professional catastrophes routinely failed. "Yeah. Dinner. That third meal, the one that you're always after me to have a proper one of?"

Carol's actually pretty sure that, should someone (should _she_ ) try to tally the number of meals she had pestered CJ to eat properly, lunch would edge out dinner by a bit, but she's too interested in figuring out what CJ's planning to say so. "Yeah. We, uh. Didn't really schedule it as a thing for all of us? Unless I'm actually needed at the President's fundraiser." _Please say I'm not, please say I'm not._ The day's been long enough without having to add "be one hundred percent professional, charming, awake, and straight at a Hollywood party while CJ walks around in formalwear" to her to-do list.

"You're not," CJ says briskly. "And good. Because I need to show you something."

"Show me what?" She mentally flips through a whole host of possibilities, each more catastrophic and less likely than the last.

CJ hastens to reassure her. "Nothing bad." When Carol lifts a skeptical eyebrow, she continues. "Really, I promise. It's just, we have a couple hours between now and dinner where the press can take care of themselves, and no one's going to miss us, and I thought, since I used to live here, I could show you this. You'll like it."

"Okay," Carol says slowly, wondering what on earth could possibly be important enough that CJ would want to escape her job and go sightseeing. "Okay, sure. Should I tell Donna or Bonnie or—"

"No," CJ snaps, so sharply that Carol flinches a little bit. "This is just for us."

"Okay," Carol says again, because there isn't really anything else to say. Gathers her coat and purse and follows CJ out to the car.

They're alone, and CJ drives, and Carol's not sure what she bribed the Secret Service with but she's impressed. CJ turns on to the 101 rather than into the neighbourhood, and Carol watches the mountains seem to creep forward towards them in silence in silence. Waiting. The whole world seems to be waiting.

"How much do you know about ... our history?" CJ finally asks, so quiet in an already silent night.

 _Our...?_ And Carol almost asks, except ... _oh._ All at once she realises what CJ's doing, why she was so insistent Carol not mention this. _Not much,_ is the answer, but she suddenly feels ashamed to say so. Childlike, sitting here in a rental car being driven down a freeway she had barely known existed by a woman who suddenly feels infinitely more worldly, so far from her boss who was slowly becoming something like a friend. "I. Should know more." She doesn't look up from her hands.

"It's okay, you know," CJ says, and Carol still doesn't look up from her hands but at least CJ's not talking to her like the child she feels like she is. "It's hard to talk about, and it's not nice, a lot of it, but ... we have to talk about it, somehow. In the ways we can."

And Carol knows enough to feel the weight of the thousands of dead boys behind _us_ , knows enough to feel guilty that she's young enough, with a controlling enough mother, that she was kept away from the worst of it. "It's one of the reasons I wanted to write," she admits, and now she does look up just enough to see CJ's profile, soft and blurry as the streetlights slip past them. "Silly bit of optimism there. Better doesn't mean safe."

She feels like she's in a dream, some sort of sleep-deprived Los Angeles-induced hallucination, like the freeway and the car and CJ are all going to vanish in a hundred thousands bits of neon and concrete and leave her to wake up back at the the fundraiser drooling into her martini. "You're brave to want even that," CJ says softly, and now Carol's sure she's dreaming.

Even when CJ pulls off the freeway, sooner than Carol had expected, crosses the LA River and stops at a corner that could have been anywhere in this strange sprawling city, it still doesn't feel real.

"There was a nightclub here," CJ says, and even her voice seems distant. Carol almost wants to ask what that has to do with anything, but she understands that whatever story CJ has to tell her is one that she has to wait for the night to reveal. "Club Laurel. In the fifties and sixties, back when even dancing with another woman was illegal." Her voice is heavy with the weight of history, like if Carol closes her eyes the neon lights and the graffitied _No Parking 7am - 6pm Weekdays, 2hr Parking Weekends 8am - 8pm_  sign would drop away and be replaced by the club.

"It closed before I moved here," she continues, "but I always used to wonder..." CJ trails off, and when Carol looks up through her eyelashes she can see her shaking her head, wavy hair brushing against her cheeks. Carol bites down hard against the rising urge to reach out, to brush aside her hair, to kiss her. Wherever this is going, it feels like a gift that she doesn't know how to repay.

"I didn't know," she says, and even she can barely hear her own voice. Her honesty is all she has.

CJ turns to face her then, eyes shining in the dim lights, and Carol can't hold back a gasp when CJ's hand settles over hers on the centre console. "I know," she says, leaning forward just enough that Carol's sure her entire body is flushing hot enough that CJ will be able to tell. "And, Carol, I know there's a limit to what we can do in our jobs, but ... I want you to know." CJ's breath catches in her throat, and Carol allows herself the briefest moment to imagine that CJ is feeling even a fraction of what she is. "I want you to know that I'm ... here. That we're here. Still."

"Still," Carol echoes, as the enormity of what CJ is saying -- and what she's saying without saying -- settles over her. "There's always a world behind us for every one we face in Washington, isn't there?"

CJ's fingers tighten around her hand as her face breaks into the saddest smile Carol thinks she's ever seen. "Yeah," she says. "Maybe you'll see them meet one day. I don't know. But until then ..."

She trails off, and it's only sheer force of will honed by newrooms and press rooms that keeps Carol still in the face of the small selfish part of her chanting  _it's not real here, you could kiss her and kiss her and it wouldn't be real, it wouldn't matter --_

Maybe LA only seems like a dream today because acknowledging that it isn't would be acknowledging how _much_  its reality truly is.

Reality. It presses closer in towards her the longer she stays frozen, refusing to give in to the urge to lean into her touch, to take CJ's hands between her own. She can't do that to CJ. Can't do that to _them_ , certainly not here, in an illegally parked car in the middle of North Hollywood.

"We, um." Carol tears her gaze away from CJ's with difficulty. "You still need to dress for dinner."

"I know," CJ says, but it's a long, long moment before she moves her hand from Carol's to put the car in drive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was hesitant to return to this fic after -- well, after The Month that it has been, as TWW's optimism seems very far away, but, well. The vaguely melancholic tone of this section seemed to fit.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys, i am the worst at updating this and i somehow still have the best readers who leave the nicest comments? i love y'all, you are seriously the main thing that keeps me coming back to this fic <3 have a slightly longer chapter

Los Angeles changes everything and nothing. Carol's not entirely sure what she expected from it, but they're all quiet on the flight home, air still with exhaustion. She sleeps fitfully pressed against the window, hyperaware of CJ just feet away and willing the cold seeping through the thin walls to calm her down.

It doesn't, not really, and maybe it's for the best. It's hard, nearly impossible to be _on_  all the time, but easier that than drowning in the memory of the tiny space between her hand and CJ's on a rental car's centre console.

Emilia's waiting when she stumbles into her apartment, head fuzzy with exhaustion and guilt. Well, she had been trying to wait, anyway, sprawled half-asleep on the couch with a notebook in her hand and a staticky _Law & Order_ re-run on the TV.

"Hey," Carol says softly, dropping her bag and crossing the room to cut Sam Waterston off mid-closing argument. "You didn't have to stay up."

"Wanted to," Emilia yawns. "George's boyfriend's over, so there's like thirty people in my apartment."

There's a thought, somewhere at the back of Carol's tongue, about the odd, all-consuming love of the group of nerds that Emilia's roommate has managed to surround himself with, and how it's safer but not much different from the newsroom or the White House, but the words won't come together. She settles for joining Emilia on the couch, curling into her side. This, too, is nice: having just one person, and the silence.

(She doesn't think about CJ, or the car where the city noise couldn't touch them. She _doesn't_.)

"How was LA?" Emilia's breath is warm across the top of her head.

Carol hums softly, considering her answer. There's parts she wants to share, parts she feels bad repeating even in the privacy of her own head. "Different," she says, and then, "good, I think. CJ and I --"

"CJ and you," Emilia laughs, cutting her off before Carol can think how she wants to finish that sentence, why she started it in the first place. "The face of the administration and her loyal knight, all off to save the world." Emilia trails her fingertips gently up and down Carol's arm, and guilt flares sharper in Carol's heart as she's struck all at once by the simplicity of this: an apartment that's not falling apart, a friend that she loves, a moment she doesn't have to hide from.

"Something like that," she says, and presses a kiss to Emilia's collarbone so she doesn't have to meet her eyes. Emilia's skin is warm, too smooth under Carol's travel-chapped lips. "Did you know Ted Marcus got ten minutes alone with the President today?"

"That's hardly enough time for fun." Carol doesn't need to look up to see the smug twinkle in Emilia's eye, but she knows it all too well despite rarely being the one gifted with it.

She groans and buries her face in the couch cushion in protest anyway. "You know that's not what I meant."

"You work for the Press Secretary, sweetheart, I _never_  get to catch you on your phrasing." She rubs comforting circles across Carol's back. "But seriously, well done whoever managed that. Not that it means much of anything."

The words could almost be Carol's own from weeks ago, standing in CJ's office too-close to shouting _it's his image, but it's our lives._  But they feel different now, or maybe _she_  feels different now, knowing the true weight of CJ's support. She lifts her head, kisses the skeptical twist of Emilia's mouth.

"I dunno," she says softly when they part. "The President has a lot of us around him, even if he doesn't know. Maybe he trips forward enough times to land somewhere better."

Emilia laughs, disbelieving but not unkind. "That sort of optimism looks weird on you." _CJ's optimism_ , Carol thinks but doesn't quite say. "Good weird," Emilia clarifies, notebook slipping to the floor as she leans forward to slide her hands into Carol's hair and claim her mouth in a much more heated kiss.

 _This could be home_ , Carol thinks, as her eyes fall shut and Emilia makes a soft, content noise that's immediately lost in the nonexistent space between their bodies. _This could be_...

But it couldn't.

"I need a shower," she murmurs against Emilia's lips. Whatever this is, it's something she doesn't know how to let go of. "Join me?"

"'Course," Emilia gives her hair a light tug, smiling at the moan Carol can't quite contain before hauling her to her feet. "And you can tell me all about the rest of your trip _afterwards._ "

Her head feels clearer as she follows Emilia to the bathroom, not quite _right_  but much less frantic. Still, she can't shake the feeling from Los Angeles, that something was about to _happen_ , and as painful as it was being pulled between work and life and unsayable things in between, she's not sure it isn't preferable to whatever will finally change it.

 

****

 

What happens is Rosslyn -- _Rosslyn_ , one word that will never again be just a town -- and Carol hates herself for how much of a surprise it is.

It's not that she's never thought about dying before. She's thought too much about it, perhaps: her death, the deaths of her friends, all too easy to imagine even in DC. But they _work for the President_ , and somehow -- somehow that seems like it should have counted for more than it did.

_Better doesn't mean safe._

She doesn't even wish she could hate Charlie and Zoey for not being careful. They're kids who shouldn't have to hide, and over and above the adrenaline and the fear she is mostly just very, very sad.

Carol paces the hospital's hallways with CJ's necklace wrapped so tightly around her fist that the metal chain draws blood, and tries not to scream.

By the time she finds CJ (bloody, disheveled, but still on her feet) she's nearly forgotten about it, and the first thing out of her mouth is, "Can I call someone for you?"

"You should go home,"  CJ says, the words automatic, no different from the hundreds of times she's said them after finding Carol still at her desk after eight. And then she pauses as the words sink in, and she shakes her head. "No, I'm. I'm going to stay. Josh -- the President -- Can I call someone for _you_?"

 _I don't care_ , Carol wants to tell her, _I don't care about the President, or ... I care about you. You and the kids. And you know why I can't call anyone._  But she wasn't _there_  when the shooting started, not really, and suddenly the few metres that had separated her from the crowd leaving the debate hall seem like a galaxy. She takes a deep breath, falls back on the one thing she knows will help them both.

"Okay," she says. She can do this. She knows what it takes to write about stories so close they're more than under her skin. "I can start drafting something for you, or find Katie -- she was there, and she's friendly, or -- do you need anything from the office? There's --" There's plans, she thinks, for what to do in this sort of catastrophe, plans that she doesn't know well enough, but she knows how to _work._

"Carol," CJ says softly. Carol feels her hands close over her tight fist, gently prying her fingers apart. She doesn't take her necklace, though, just leaves it resting on Carol's palm, covers it with her own. "I know what you're thinking, and I don't think it's helpful."

 _Too bad,_  Carol nearly retorts, but even now she manages to choke back the impulse. "I'll take a nap if you will." It's as much of a promise as she's willing to make, infinitely calmer than she ever expected to sound.

CJ doesn't answer aloud, just turns and walks back to the waiting room, leaving her necklace in Carol's hand.

Carol clenches her fist again, and breathes.

 

****

 

But in the aftermath, it's not even about hate. It's about one man, and the story is: The president lied; the president got found out. And _that_ story, that story Carol knows how to deal with.

Carol shrugs, bites back a hundred variants on _I told you so_ , and sets about helping CJ with damage control. She is, she thinks, one of the few people in this White House largely unsurprised by the revelation -- men lie, and politicians lie, and if male politicians stopped lying about their personal lives she's pretty sure the world would stop turning. She rolls her eyes at the specifics -- leave it to a Princeton economist to forget that being president confers certain obligations upon a person -- but she is, at first, wholly prepared to deal. Jed Bartlet is not who she followed into the west wing.

Until she sees CJ's face, and every potential ramification hits her all at once.

"CJ," she says quietly, two days after when the shell-shock has stopped being painted on everyone's faces but still hangs stubbornly in the air, "how long did you know? Before you told me?"

CJ's almost inaudible when she says, "I'm sorry."

"CJ. How. Long?"

"Just a couple days, I promise. I'm so--" She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. "It might've -- we needed to see, exactly, what was going to come out."

Carol will not, will not, will _not_ bang her head against CJ's desk, but she does snort in disbelief. "What, did you think this was going to go _away_? Like Leo's drug problem went away?" CJ flinches, and Carol pushes aside a twinge of regret. "I thought I worked with some of the smartest people in the world."

"Yeah, well," CJ props her chin on her hand and fixes her with a _look_. Carol sinks deeper into the couch, still not quite able to believe they're having this conversation. "Sometimes that just means we're really good at finding ways to fuck up _astronomically_."

 _No fucking shit,_ Carol thinks, but she bites the words back. The last thing this conversation needs is her being a smartass; the last thing _she_ needs is to piss off her already exhausted, overworked, and hurt boss even more. What she says, instead, is "How can I help you manage this if you won't tell me things?" She wants to say: _how can I protect you_? She wants to say: _how can either of us protect him, us, this, this chosen family?_ She can't, quite, but thinks maybe CJ can see some of it writ across her face.

"Oh, Carol," CJ says, so warm and exasperated and not-really-pitying that Carol thinks she could die from it. "Depending on if -- how -- it was going to come out, it might have been better for you not to know. So you could say, if they asked..." She trails off, shakes her head, processing, even through her admission, how inadequate it sounds; this, too, is unbearable.

"You ... you were trying to protect me?" she asks, not sure what part of that she finds least believable. Or, honestly, most attractive.

The smile playing at the edges of CJ's mouth is minuscule and rueful, but real. "Yeah, well. I think we've already established no one was thinking at their best."

"No, no," Carol hastens to reassure her, though she files CJ's not quite an apology somewhere for later examination. "It's ... I appreciate the thought, I do." She makes a face at herself. That sounded properly idiotic. "It's just that..." CJ raises an eyebrow, waiting. "The first time they told you that, Toby or Sam or Josh, did you believe them?"

It's a guess, based on a mostly-remembered half-overheard fights between CJ and Toby more than a year ago, but CJ blushes and the bad part of Carol twists in satisfaction. "Believed that they thought it was for my own good, or believed that they were right in keeping it from me?"

Carol just arches her own eyebrow in answer, and CJ sighs. "Yeah, all right. Point taken." Carol manages her first real smile in ages in return, but it's quickly erased by a yawn. "You should go grab a few hours' sleep," CJ says softly.

"Oh, no, CJ," she says quickly, sitting up as fast as the couch will let her. "I'm fine. I promise."

"It's been a long week," CJ says insistently. "The work will still be here tomorrow. That, _I_ promise."

Another yawn makes the decision for her. "Okay." And then, because it's already been that sort of night: "But only if you do too."

CJ's silent, staring at the stack of folders at the far corner of her desk. "CJ? It's --" she checks her watch, is startled to see how quickly time has passed. Being in CJ's office, especially for these sorts of serious talks, always seems to do that: time, already being cruel enough to keep moving forward, goes inexorably faster through the moments she wants to live in forever. "It's nearly ten," she shakes herself out of those thoughts. _Unhelpful, unhelpful, unhelpful._ Especially now.

"Yeah, okay," CJ says, but though she stands up, she makes no move towards her coat.

"I'll walk you out?" It's a question, despite her attempt to make it a statement.

"Yeah, okay," CJ says again. She already sounds more distant, and Carol bites her mouth shut against saying _sorry sorry sorrysorry._

Tomorrow. As long as she makes it until tomorrow. And the next tomorrow, and the one after that, for as long as the administration manages to hold on.


End file.
